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Cover image for Beloved : a novel
Format:
Book
Title:
Beloved : a novel
ISBN:
9780394535975
Edition:
First edition.
Distribution:
New York : Distributed by Random House, Inc.
Publication:
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
Physical Description:
275 pages ; 24 cm
Contents:
Introduction / Harold Bloom -- Haunted by Their Nightmares / Margaret Atwood -- Toni Morrison's Beloved / Roger Sale -- A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Marilyn Sanders Mobley -- Beloved and the New Apocalypse / Susan Bowers -- Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved / David Lawrence -- Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past / Bernard W. Bell -- Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos -- Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Linda Krumholz -- Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in Beloved / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese -- Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved / Ashraf H.A. Rushdy -- Beloved: Toni Morrison's Post-Apocalyptic Novel / Josef Pesch -- Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, "Rememory," and a "Clamor for a Kiss" / Caroline Rody -- Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison's Beloved and the Moynihan Report / James Berger -- Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved / Pamela E. Barnett.
Summary:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future.
Program Information:
Accelerated Reader AR 7.3 : 17.0 : 8652.

Reading Counts RC High School 8.1 19 Quiz: 01067 Guided reading level: NR.
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